Language service provider for Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian

The Balkans have always been known for their turbulent history, marked in particular by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Over the years, this has led to a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences developing in the region. Croatians, Serbians and Bosnians have different religions and often belong to different cultural groups, although a large part of the nations lived side by side under foreign overlords and their languages have a common “genetic” foundation. In this context, linguists talk about something known as the South Slavic dialect continuum, which includes the Serbo-Croatian continuum. It was linguistically standardised in the 19th century and this led to Serbo-Croatian being established as a common written language decades before the establishment of a Yugoslav state and as a result of several language reforms. In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian was the official language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (then called Serbo-Croato-Slovenian) and, later, one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Additional official languages during this period included Slovene, Albanian and Macedonian.

Since the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there has been no more talk of Serbo-Croatian, as political and linguistic developments have produced several autonomous successor states. This meant a transition to a nation-state language policy and the separation of language along ethnic and political lines. Accordingly, Serbo-Croatian was replaced by the standard varieties Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. There is also an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard. The fact is that these South Slavic languages are closely related to each other and are completely mutually intelligible. The linguistic differences between the lexis, syntax, morphology and phonetics of these languages are negligible and primarily attributable to extra-linguistic developments in the Balkans.

Language contact between German and Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian has a long tradition. There are a large number of Germanisms in these three languages, although they are hardly recognisable as such any more due to linguistic and orthographic adaptations, such as fajront and Feierabend (evening after work), foranga and Vorhang (curtain), or escajg and Esszeug (cutlery). Words were also exchanged in the other direction: For example, German took the word Paprika (pepper) from Serbian and the word Krawatte (tie) from Croatian. In addition, these South Slavic languages have numerous new and old internationalisms in common with German(profesor – Professor, analizirati – analysieren (analyse), certifikat– Zertifikat (certificate)). Furthermore, close relations were also maintained in the cultural sphere, as there were a number of scholars, literary figures and artists from Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina who lived and worked in Germany and Austria. Throughout history, these languages have been written in a variety of writing systems: the Glagolitic script (mainly in Croatia), the Arabic alphabet (mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina), the Cyrillic script, and various modifications of the Latin and Greek alphabets. Serbian Cyrillic is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script for the Serbo-Croatian language, developed by the Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who followed the principle “write as you speak”. During the same period, Croatian linguists led by Ljudevit Gaj adapted the Latin alphabet used in the western South Slavic regions in accordance with the same principles. As a result of this joint effort, the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets for Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian match each other one to one, with the Latin digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj each counting as one letter each. Today, the former Serbo-Croatian is written in both Latin and Cyrillic script. Serbian and Bosnian use both alphabets, while Croatian uses only Latin.

It is estimated that there are currently around 22 million speakers of Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. These languages are also spoken in other parts of the Balkans, beyond the national borders of each of the countries. Croatian is also spoken in Vojvodina and Serbian is spoken in Kosovo, Montenegro and Croatia, while all three languages are recognised as official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian are also present as migrant languages in Germany, Austria, France, Sweden, Canada, the United States, Australia, etc. By the time Croatian entered the EU in 2013 and since the planned enlargement of the European Union to include other countries of the former Yugoslavia, the demand for translations into these languages (mainly into Croatian, but also to some extent into Serbian and Bosnian) has also increased. This is due in particular to Germany’s role as one of the most important trading partners of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.